Peppermint Two Now Officially Available

It is our distinct honor to announce the release of the second major iteration of Peppermint OS. Peppermint Two is now available either for free download or via purchasable Live CD. This edition is based upon Lubuntu 11.04 and includes a number of new features. Also this marks the first time Peppermint has been available in 64 bit architecture. I’ll take a moment to cover some of the new features present in this release:

We’re now using Chromium as the default web browser in our main release. This decision was made after gaining several months of user feedback and contrasting the pros and cons of both Chromium and Firefox. In addition, the Ice SSB framework was written to work with Chromium and the deprecation of Mozilla’s Prism project made this decision an easy one.

The Ice SSB application has added functionality for removing SSBs as well as creating them. In hindsight, we probably should have put this in the first time around, but we’re happy to say that it’s there now.

We’ve added some additional example SSBs to the default install from pixlr, including the Express photo editor and a remarkably entertaining photo filter app called pixlr-o-matic. We’re big fans of playing with photos and hope you have as much fun with these as we have.

The entire look and feel has been revamped. We had a lot of feedback regarding the stylistic decisions we made with both Peppermint One and Peppermint Ice and decided that the best course of action was to fall somewhere in the middle, while offering improved themes for the windows and icons.

Dropbox integration has been improved. The implementation that was present in the original release was constantly buggy and we’re happy to announce that these issues have been resolved.

We’re now using the Guayadeque music player as the system default. After extensive testing, this music player offered us the best combination of positive traits such as ease of use, speed, install footprint, and scalability to handle large collections. It can be found in the Sound & Video menu under the name “Music Player”.

There have been some other application changes, such as the inclusion of LXKeymap, which offers a comprehensive solution for changing keyboard layouts. Also you may notice that Gedit replaces Leafpad as the default text editor so that coders might take advantage of features such as syntax highlighting without having to install additional software.

We certainly hope you enjoy it. For specifics regarding the download and installation prodecures, please visit our newly written User’s Guide for the finer details. Peppermint Two is available immediately in both 32 bit format and in 64 bit format. Have fun with it and don’t forget to buy us a beer or two. :)